Privacy Rights

The House approved a bill that would grant legal status to President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program with new restrictions. Republicans called it a test before the election of whether Democrats want to fight or coddle terrorists.

The Census Bureau, the main collector of information about Americans, has 'lost' over 246 computers containing personal data since 2001 according to the Commerce Dept. The number of people put at risk by this incompetence could not be

The House Intelligence Committee approved by voice vote a bill that would put into law the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants. The sponsor had rewritten the measure to make it more to Mr. Bush's liking.

A House of Representatives Committee has approved a controversial bill that would broaden the government's ability to conduct electronic surveillance on US residents by making it easier for federal law enforcement officials to get court-issued wa

Under the pressure of a hotly contested national election, Congress is on the verge of approving the most sweeping changes to government spying powers in a generation.
Five years after President Bush launched the National Security Agency's war

New Jersey has the right to obtain information about a federal domestic surveillance program because that program is no longer a secret, the state argued in response to federal efforts to quash its investigation.

"The biggest thing with me was the government telling you that you can't do this," Chuck Fordham said. "Most smokers, after they eat, want a cigarette. And to get up from the table to smoke, it's just a pain."

The Federal Education Dept. shared personal information on hundreds of student loan applicants with the FBI across a 5-year period that began after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The program, called Project Strikeback, the Ed Dept. received names from

A computer in the car would beep if it spots a stolen vehicle. The system is able to scan as many as 1,500 license plates a day. In a typical day, an officer without the system would be lucky to run 40 plates.

Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America.

Most motorists probably don't know that they've been giving a free ride to a silent passenger who's secretly recording their driving habits. Or that lawyers, police and insurers might someday want that passenger to provide evidence.

Two AOL employees were fired and its chief technology officer has left the company following a privacy breach in which the Internet search terms of more than 650,000 subscribers were publicly released.

The U.S. government sued Maine officials to block their demand that Verizon disclose whether it gave the government's spying program access to its customer data. "The defendant state officers' attempts to obtain such information are inva

[Like the gov't. cares about your privacy.] The US government will not require recorders in autos but said that car makers must tell consumers when technology that tracks speed, braking and other measurements is in the new vehicles they buy.

President Bush criticized a federal court ruling that said his warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional, declaring that opponents "do not understand the nature of the world in which we live. I strongly disagree with that decision, str

A federal panel of judges has consolidated 17 lawsuits throughout the US filed against telephone companies accused of assisting the Bush adminstration to monitor Americans' communications without warrants. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict

Electronic US passports have a major vulnerability that allows criminals to clone embedded secret code and enter countries illegally. Personal information stored on the documents could be copied and transferred to another device.

A White House-endorsed plan to formally legalize the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program [retroactively] ran into more political problems in the Senate, as Democrats successfully maneuvered to block a committee vot

Little-known T-rays see through clothing, identify explosives and drugs, and detect tumors. Often overlooked, T-rays are even being used to explore the universe. Between microwaves and X-rays lie T-rays, or terahertz radiation, the most common form o

A judge ruled Tuesday that a 16-year-old cancer patient who has refused conventional medical treatment does not have to report to a hospital as previously ordered and scheduled a trial to settle the dispute.

Does the federal government need to know whether you aced Aristotelian ethics but had to repeat introductory biology? Does it need to know your family's financial profile, how much aid you received and whether you took off a semester to help out

The first electronic medical records products to win government approval were announced, a step toward encouraging doctors to switch from paper systems.
The certification of 19 companies' products — by a national group funded by the government

While the Patriot Act and National Security Agency wiretapping have received enormous attention and criticism from the mainstream media, another federal agency has been quietly gathering far more personal information about U.S. residents than those l

The Bush administration is considering requiring U.S. banks, for the first time, to inform the government of all their customers' international wire transfers, regardless of possible terrorist ties, a Treasury Department official said.

The number of reported attempts to penetrate Pentagon computer networks rose sharply in the past decase, from fewer than 800 in 1996 to more than 160,000 last year - thousands of them successful. At the same time, the nation's ability to safegua

The Bush administration admitted that it was conducting warrantless surveillance of the finanical transactions of Americans and others only after newspapers exposed the program. According to some Republicans, the solution is to imprison journalists

A civil liberties group has asked government around the world, including Australia, to block the release of confidential financial records to US authorities tracking terrorst funding. London-based watchdog Privacy International said it had filed